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unswerving loyalty and discipline. He was educated but not overeducated. In the war he had shown respect for tradecraft and courage under fire. He was a genius with radios and able to deflect attention from himself as completely as a mirror.
    He was quite unlike the KGB’s best-known British recruits, the so-called Cambridge Five, whom he detested. Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, and Anthony Blunt were cosseted products of the English class system. Fisher was a stranger to privilege. He saw himself as a Soviet patriot and the others as traitors to their motherland. They were louche and libidinous. He was ascetic. They were dilettantes. He was a Bolshevik born and bred—yet he was also irresistibly human. “There was something—can I say that?—lovable about him.” That was the verdict of the man whom Fisher fooled most comprehensively about his true identity, the New York artist Burton Silverman.
    Fisher was rail thin, with the countenance of a weasel and a mental toughness that still amazes those who knew him. He switched identities throughout his working life but never forgot his own. He could hold forth for hours on music theory or mathematics, both of which he taught himself. He was a soulful player of the classical guitar and a passable painter whose work Robert Kennedy would later try to hang in the White House.
    He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England in 1903 to German parents. He moved with them to Russia at age eighteen. Those bare facts of his biography gave him fluency in the three languages a secret agent of his era needed most. His father gave him his vocation: Heinrich Fisher was already a committed revolutionary when he first met Lenin in the 1890s. Having grown up on an aristocrat’s estate in central Russia, he turned to Marxism with the zeal and arrogance of the autodidact. He and Lenin taught and agitated at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institution until Fisher senior was arrested for sedition and exiled to Archangel in the Russian Arctic in 1896. After that, as an ethnic German, he faced deportation and compulsory service in the German army. England offered refuge. Heinrich sailed with his young wife to Newcastle upon Tyne, where they had two sons. The first was named Henry after his father. The second was William, but they called him Willie.
    After the 1905 Russian revolution failed, Willie’s father turned to gunrunning to help the proletariat he had left behind. (One shipment that was discovered before being dispatched to the Baltic included more than a million rounds of ammunition, including some for the type of Mauser pistol used to assassinate Czar Nicholas.) After the 1917 revolutionsucceeded, the Fishers returned to Russia to put themselves at its service.
    Willie Fisher embraced the great Soviet experiment in utopia building, and it embraced him back. He joined the Communist Youth League, which put him to work as a translator. Then he served two years in the Red Army as a radio operator. He was young enough for his command of languages and experience of a foreign country to be a qualification, not grounds for suspicion. By the age of twenty-four, in the eyes of the ever-expanding Soviet intelligence apparatus, he was ripe for recruitment. He was also married to the illegitimate daughter of a Polish count.
    Elena Lebedeva, a ballerina-turned-harpist at the Moscow Conservatory, met Fisher at a party in 1926. She glimpsed in him a loneliness and self-sufficiency at once intriguing and forbidding, which he carried with him all the way to Glienicke Bridge. When he proposed to her she asked him: “But do you love me?”
    “How do I know if I love you?” he replied. “Your character is soft and warm. I’m the opposite, but we’ll make a good couple. We’ll complement each other.”
    We’ll complement each other
. Such bleak detachment may have helped him withstand the strain of life as a covert agent, but it was born of tragedy. A few